


The Scream Between the Stars

by The_Last_Kenobi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Gen, Jedi Purges, Order 66 (Star Wars), Order 66 Aftermath (Star Wars), Realistic trauma after mass murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27810178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Last_Kenobi/pseuds/The_Last_Kenobi
Summary: Ahsoka Tano walks away from battles.She walks away from the Temple.She walks away from the wreckage and despair of Order 66, and finds that the black space between the lights can swallow someone whole.Especially when there's no one there to hold your hand.(Spoilers for The Mandalorian Chapter 13)
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Baby Yoda (The Mandalorian TV) & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 7
Kudos: 130





	The Scream Between the Stars

(There's a name for it.)

She doesn’t like to think about the word too much.

The Empire certainly bans it, refuses to let it be used – what _happened_ that day has been reduced to military strategy, to necessity… even celebration.

It makes her stomach turn.

Ahsoka doesn’t want to know the details.

It was hard enough being the only Jedi on a starship full of Clone troopers who had suddenly turned on her. Bad enough, sensing their free will stripped away so quickly they barely had a moment to feel anything was wrong before all that made them unique was contained to a box in the back of their minds, left there to gather dust and scream for the rest of their puppet lives.

Bad enough, only saving one out of thousands.

Standing there in the snow with the weight of her loss on her shoulders, her muscles aching, that was something for which there were not strong enough words to describe.

Pain.

Loss.

Failure.

Grief.

Exhaustion.

None of these come anywhere close enough, no matter how many times she turns them over in her head.

Someone used implants in the backs of her men’s heads to force them to comply, to turn and shoot their sworn allies and to execute anyone who got in their way. The Clones marched like marionettes now, identical and rigid and clumsy.

All that skill, that talent, the raw passion and love that drove them – take that away, and the newly birthed Empire is left with a shadow army to stand on.

She and Rex spend eleven hours searching through the wreckage.

Pulling corpses from their ship.

Rex breaks down after they drag a still-breathing trooper from the mess, a man she hadn’t known very well by the name of Faze.

But he had worn her colors and fought under her command, and as Rex hauls him out he mutters and curses and tries to put his hands around Rex’s throat, mumbling over and over again about Order 66.

Order 66.

Jedi.

Terminated.

On sight.

All Jedi.

Terminated.

All of them.

Faze shudders and dies still swearing that they must surrender, and Ahsoka helps her brother-in-arms bury his brothers-by-blood and creed. It takes hours.

His hands bleed.

Hers do not.

Rex won’t let them, he’s the one using tools as shovels and she uses the Force to lift snow and soil and cover them again.

Then Rex leaves.

Ahsoka stands in the snow and the taste of heartbreak, her own face staring back at her in the handpainted markings on the helmets they propped up on staffs, a feeble gesture to the men that had lost their lives long before their hearts stopped beating.

Their armor helped set them apart. Where nat-borns looked on them and saw identical units, armor helped them see, helped them understand that each of the Clones was his own man. 

Distinctive armor was so important to them.

They had made theirs match her image.

They had loved her.

She will never stop loving them, and in that she will never stop _hurting_.

It feels unfair, that she has to stand in this barren frigid wasteland, when she's already so cold and hollowed out inside. Ahsoka dreams of fire and screaming. But not a sound escapes her lips - she will never cry again. She shed her last tears the day she left the Temple, left Anakin. 

Now she stares at hell with no tears to blur her vision.

She drops the saber Anakin made for her, a tribute to the man she has certainly lost along with everything and everyone else, and a testament to her failure and despair.

The former Jedi walks away into the yawning maw of the future, and she thinks she _understands_ , now, the tiredness that had always dogged Obi-Wan. Even when he laughed he was aching; even when he was resting he was restless.

Weighed down by loss and disappointment.

But he will never know _this_ pain.

Obi-Wan is dead.

He must be.

He was on Utupau, chasing General Grievous – reports had just come in of his success when Order 66 came down. Right in the thick of things, taking the brunt of it like he always was. Her Grandmaster always seemed to come out of things more damaged than the others, inside and out.

With Cody, usually.

Some horrid, _festering_ part of her mind conjures up an image where Commander Cody stoops to pick up the lightsaber that Obi-Wan was always ‘deliberately’ dropping into his care, stiffening as he heard the Order in his ears, and then turning – finding his General behind him, smiling that small, sad, genuine smile – still smiling as Cody ignites the man’s lightsaber and turns it against him, ramming it through his gut –

The image stops with Obi-Wan’s eyes widening in shock, his lips parting.

She always forces it out of her head before it can go any further.

She’d stop it earlier if she could, but her mind won’t let her.

Determined to give color and shape to her loss.

The Negotiator is dead, her Grandmaster is dead, Obi-Wan is _dead_ , well and truly gone.

Like Anakin.

Her Master, her _brother_ -

~~_— my older brother taught me —_ ~~

Anakin.

 _Skyguy_.

Thinking his name is painful.

She had thought... there would have been time to catch up later, after, when the dust had settled.

 _Time_.

She had failed him.

Her Master. Anakin.

Like the men she failed.

Like the rest of the Jedi.

And the word, _that word—_

It comes back again, rising up between her desperately clenched teeth, between the fingers of the iron grip of the Empire, between the lines of rewritten history.

The truth lies in the cold space between the stars.

Darkness rules the universe. 

Light and warmth and Life, these are the exceptions, powerless in the infinite black; the darkness is and is not, the absence of heat, of life, of light and all things good. And yet even in its absence the Darkness possesses a power the Light can never match.

The lights are so few.

The Jedi Order is only echoes, now – the light of stars that burned out centuries and millennia ago, a glow with no substance behind it, the life stolen by time and deceit.

They are legends now.

And she is not a Jedi, although she was almost executed as one.

Ahsoka refuses to return to the Temple.

She can’t bring herself to do it, not even on the chance of finding another of her brethren, and not out of fear of the Sith-damned Empire and its unreachable Masters, the black figures who ride its crest and control its army without care for who the men are, who they were.

She can’t set foot on Coruscant.

It bleeds.

It _screams._

The _word_ cries out in a ragged wail from the Temple, once a beacon of light and stability – even when she had left and her doubt was highest, she still felt that Light – and it was a scream full of blood, heart-wrenching and full of emptiness, unheard by most.

Anyone with a trace of Force-sensitivity feels, at least, a ripple of unease.

Those few highly trained individuals left in the wide, wide, wide, wide galaxy can feel the scream down to their bones.

And it has _voices_.

She can hear them, when she passes too close to the Core – or when she meditates too deeply – and when she dreams.

Petro.

Katooni.

Jocasta Nu.

Cin Drallig.

Liam.

The little Archives Padawan, Hochan, quiet and clumsy and torn between his desire to learn and teach and his wish to be a part of the war that was taking so many of his fellows away.

Bant Eerin, Obi-Wan’s only remaining childhood friend – only, only, his very very last – a Mon Cal Healer with the sweetest laugh and gentle patience.

Sira Cahn, a tiny Togruta girl not even four years old who looked up to the Padawan of Anakin Skywalker as a hero.

An ancient Kel Dor Master – like _Plo_ , her heart mourns, feeling the empty spot in her heart where their old bond used to live – who provided cloaks for active-roster Jedi, who knew everyone’s size and shape and preferred color and density off the top of his head, whose name she had somehow never learned.

When she listens, when she strays too close to the empty places, she can hear their voices.

Distinct, even in the great unending scream.

It may be true that sentient life passes into the Greater Force after death.

She doesn’t know what to believe, when the ghosts of Barriss and Anakin and Obi-Wan haunt her every day.

But whatever the reality of death, the Force leaves…

Echoes.

Like the Jedi, their legend, their Light. Ringing out into the vast reaches, perhaps forever.

And the impact of Order 66 has left an open, poisonous wound, Dark and loud.

Inside it, the voices of the murdered and betrayed cry out in unending anguish, from the oldest Master to the last-standing Guard to the smallest child, standing in their crib on unsteady bare feet, uncomprehending as the stranger in the nursery brings death on the end of a Republic-issued blaster.

The Empire celebrates and reforms and issues edicts and laws, and planets succumb to brutal mining and martial law, and Senators bow at the feet of the monsters.

Everywhere, everywhere, _always_ the screaming.

The dead, the damned.

New voices join every day as the Jedi are hunted down and extinguished.

A scream, a choked cry – somewhere out there, a Jedi in hiding is exterminated like a roach, their last moments of defiance a secret that will never be printed in history books or sung of in songs, except the endless screaming in the darkness.

Their voice, however brave or sweet or afraid, is distorted into a wail forever.

And though the _word_ will never be spoken in more than whispers, the distance between the stars tells the truth.

The bitter word.

More than murder, more than betrayal, more even than execution.

_Genocide._

Ahsoka hears it in the void where her family used to live, and feels a loneliness in her soul that even Rex, with his mind-controlled brothers still on patrol, cannot fully understand.

She had told Yoda she was coming home – not in so many words, but they had both understood.

She had meant to be a Jedi again.

Now she will always, only, be a former Jedi, one of a handful, marked for death.

She will never train an apprentice.

Ahsoka Tano flies between the stars, half-drunk on the pain of emptiness and broken bonds, and understands how fleeting the light is. The stars are the universe’s exception, the diamonds in the endless waste.

The light her people forged for millennia is already burning out, fading, a haunting melody ending with missing and discordant notes.

The sound of genocide is so much _louder_ , and it goes on and on and on and on-

There is no honor in a death brought about by being hunted to extinction.

So Ahsoka Tano keeps going, chasing the stars where she can find them.

Trying not to lose herself in the scream between the lights.

(She is no Jedi.)

(A Mandalorian who thinks of the Jedi as sorcerers from days long dead brings her a child who survived the slaughter that day, in that Temple.)

(She tells him to run.)

(Ahsoka Tano cannot raise a Jedi.)

(She walks alone back out into the stars, and the voids between them, and tries not to listen to the screaming that still pursues her.)


End file.
